This invention relates to financial systems and to the management of assets by individual consumers. This system provides individual consumers with access to their financial assets 24 hours a day with speed and flexibility from hundreds of locations. The invention enables customers to immediately convert a selected portion of their financial assets into different forms of assets.
The contemporary typical consumer practice to maintain assets is by maintenance of bank checking accounts, separate credit card accounts, and unconnected store credit, debit and charge accounts in order to pay for purchases made and make payments for financial and other products and services. Although this current system is profitable for traditional banks, and credit card associations, in terms of transaction fees and interest collected, this fragmentation of mechanisms for managing personal financial assets is cumbersome and costly for consumers, retailers and other parties to financial payment transactions. Given recently developed hardware and software technology, sophisticated data processing services, secure access and identification technology and one or more FDIC-insured Banks (“Bank”), it is feasible to provide customers with a menu of financial and payment services through an integrated service provider and a single host processor.